Small ISV's - do you really feel like Microsoft cares about you any more?
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Sadly I know exactly what you mean - I feel exactly as you do. The current MSDN setup is definitely not ISV friendly (the rampaging pricing has certainly seen to that), and neither is their partner programme, which appears to be aimed solely at partners who wish to resell MS product to their clients. Empower appears on paper to be a great idea - but the ISV competancy tests which go with it are an inflexible joke our product couldn't pass no matter what we do (it's native code, and doesn't use Office or XML Web Services. Even MS UK threw up their hands and said "we don't know" at that one). I get the impression that Microsoft's idea of an ISV is an SME with venture capital funding rather than a successful small business of the type you describe. A shame really. They're missing an opportunity, and as you say in many cases that could mean throwing away customers to the OSS stack.
Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
Wait, what? There is only one competency test to pass... Either you pass the one with a solution supporting Windows Server, or a solution passing compatibility with Windows 7. You can't pass either of those? If you can't, you have more problems than just being in the partner program... Those tests are dirt simple to pass... Even OUR application passed it and we consider the code in it sloppy and buggy. There is no requirement for Office or XML Web Services. None.
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it still comes down to how many devs you have and what level you're using MSDN at. If you renew yearly the breakeven point is 3 or 4 devs at the baseline subscription levels (Professinal with MSDN Essentials, 549; Professional with MSDN $799), if you're using premium or ultimate it's a no-brainer. If you've decided a subscription is worthless and it's only worth buying MSDN for a new VS iteration then over the last decade you'd've bought MSDN 4x, or once every 2.5 years. At that point you need 5 or 6 devs to break even ($799, $1199) unless you're using premium or higher, in which case it's again a no-brainer. Depending on your workflow you can easily do without all the stuff in premium or higher so it still a bad fit for the smaller shops. I know MS wants to get you hooked on their advanced tools, but not everyone wants/needs the stuff they do.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
I think this boils down to what you need and what you don't need... Also, people comparing the MSDN Universal of 4 or 5 years ago cannot compare to what they offer now. The software is no where near the same. Before Team System came around, there really wasn't anything special to go after. You either got the dev tools or you didn't. Why does a 1 person shop need the architect version of visual studio? Why do you even need the database developers edition? That stuff is geared towards the large distributed teams that want all the development broken out by different people creating enterprise software. The chances that a 1 person shop is creating huge enterprise software is pretty slim. If you are doing it, my apologies, but also the best of luck to you. We have 4 developers (including myself who double teams as the manager), and we would be paying 3x what we are now had the partner program not been around. With our lowly $1450 a year, we get 10 MSDN subs, 10 licenses to Visual Studio Premium, TFS with client licenses, and a crap ton of test software that each of us has access too. Not to mention more production licenses of servers and client OS's that we will never fully use. Heck, I have 40 licenses to Windows 7 Enterprise that I haven't even found a use for yet. We look at whats available to us if we go gold, and for us the only reason to go gold is to get recognition, and in our market, being a partner is enough. When we look at the higher levels of the MSDN subscriptions with visual studio, there is nothing in there that would benefit us, at all. Even with the expression studio ultimate, the only thing you get is the stupid sketchflow which doesn't really make things any easier anyway. Most of the stuff, even in the premium edition, is mostly useless fluff that small 1 man shops can do without. Having early access to the betas are take it or leave it.. But getting a new copy of studio the day it comes out has kept us ahead of the game.
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No, It is the platform ready test. http://www.microsoftplatformready.com/[^] The website seems to be down for sometime.
I can get there just fine, it's not down for me. It's just ONE platform ready test. From the requirements: Effective October 2010 Competency requirements are closely aligned with customer needs. To attain the Silver ISV/Software competency, you must meet the following requirements. Testing Requirements Your organization must deliver one software application or solution that must pass one of the following application tests: Windows 7 Platform Ready Windows Server 2008 R2 Platform Ready Windows Azure Platform Ready SQL Azure Platform Ready Certified for Microsoft Surface Qualifying applications include developed and marketed packaged software solutions based on Microsoft technologies. Custom-written applications not meant for resale do not qualify. Note: If your organization has qualified for the Silver ISV/Software competency with a software test that is not in the preceding list, you must meet the requirements detailed here once your test expires to retain the Silver ISV/Software competency. I did ours in about an hour. And that included downloading and setting up virtual environments to do the testing (i had VMs already built). So it might take longer for you to do, but they provide all the testing software and instructions. All you do is upload the XML file once it's done and it's auto-passed as long as your pass the test. It was showing up in my partner account 2 days after I submitted it.
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Wait, what? There is only one competency test to pass... Either you pass the one with a solution supporting Windows Server, or a solution passing compatibility with Windows 7. You can't pass either of those? If you can't, you have more problems than just being in the partner program... Those tests are dirt simple to pass... Even OUR application passed it and we consider the code in it sloppy and buggy. There is no requirement for Office or XML Web Services. None.
That appears to have changed only recently - the last time we looked at it a prerequisite of passing the ISV Competancy was an independent Platform Test by Verisign, including at least one "elective test component" of Office, XML Web Services etc. Visual Studio integration and ATL (both of which would have been ideal elective components for us) were not included, and our product used none of those available. Hence we simply couldn't pass that test.
Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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It used to rock being a small software developer using Microsoft tools and technology. They supported us all the way with excellent programs like MSDN Universal which for one flat reasonable price gave you every tool the big guys used. They ditched MSDN Universal and I started to notice all sorts of stuff drifting slowly out of reach. For their online mapping solution they have two plans, free for non commercial useage and eye gougingly expensive to the point you need hundreds of thousands of customers to afford. There seems to be no middle ground any more with them. I'm starting to wonder if they just haven't written off smaller ISV's assuming they use open source software and technology and moved their focus to large corporate developers. The problem with that is small ISV's are no reflection of their client base, we focus on small business and we have thousands of customers all over the globe who use our software as an integral part of their business, in fact it causes them to continually upgrade their windows and buy desktop pc's, year after year, more often than not Office to go along with it etc. If I get pushed into the arms of open source and "cloud" development and move our app entirely online Microsoft loses not merely my MSDN subscription but potentially a lot of desktop computer users and their windows licenses and Office licenses etc etc. And I'm sure as hell not going to Microsoft's Azure cloud with it's unreliable, Byzantine pricing structures and policies. (Though I don't know if anyone else is any better at this point.) Maybe as we are all shoved onto Clouds the small ISV is a thing of the past, maybe you have to have a big investment to roll out a new online app. Maybe you can't start out with a couple of guys in a garage any more.
There is no failure only feedback
Well, I'm not an ISV but my personal feeling is that MS has given up on the small developer, and Windows "native" development. My personal observation is most "native" work is being done with Linux, and anyone who wants to do "native C++" doesn't have much of a choice except to migrate away from Windows. History: SCO Unix and then USL sold "desktop Unix" licenses for $800 per computer; everyone quickly migrated to Windows 3.1 which cost $30. IBM had OS/2 (again, at $800 and over per computer) and when Windows NT appeared, there was a fairly rapid migration to Windows NT (cost under $100 at that time.) Now MS Windows desktop lists for $200 to $400. Hmmm where is the market going to go?
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It used to rock being a small software developer using Microsoft tools and technology. They supported us all the way with excellent programs like MSDN Universal which for one flat reasonable price gave you every tool the big guys used. They ditched MSDN Universal and I started to notice all sorts of stuff drifting slowly out of reach. For their online mapping solution they have two plans, free for non commercial useage and eye gougingly expensive to the point you need hundreds of thousands of customers to afford. There seems to be no middle ground any more with them. I'm starting to wonder if they just haven't written off smaller ISV's assuming they use open source software and technology and moved their focus to large corporate developers. The problem with that is small ISV's are no reflection of their client base, we focus on small business and we have thousands of customers all over the globe who use our software as an integral part of their business, in fact it causes them to continually upgrade their windows and buy desktop pc's, year after year, more often than not Office to go along with it etc. If I get pushed into the arms of open source and "cloud" development and move our app entirely online Microsoft loses not merely my MSDN subscription but potentially a lot of desktop computer users and their windows licenses and Office licenses etc etc. And I'm sure as hell not going to Microsoft's Azure cloud with it's unreliable, Byzantine pricing structures and policies. (Though I don't know if anyone else is any better at this point.) Maybe as we are all shoved onto Clouds the small ISV is a thing of the past, maybe you have to have a big investment to roll out a new online app. Maybe you can't start out with a couple of guys in a garage any more.
There is no failure only feedback
I (we, the company I work for) feel the same way, but perhaps for different reasons. Mostly, these days it seems Microsoft is trying to solve problems which aren't the problems we have. They produce wonderful frameworks/tools etc. that look good until we try to use them, and then we discover they are still great if you use them as intended, but because we are not an enterprise/large scale outfit, the way they were intended to be used just doesn't work for us. That's why, as a small ISV, we feel unloved. Of course it would be nice if things were cheaper, but I haven't heard my boss complaining about the price of MSDN... our current issue that our MCP/MCTS/MCPD certifications have expired. By having a certain number of employees with these certs we achieved some level of partner status which made MSDN more afforable (I think we had to have 2 certed employees to MCPD level, plus two customer references + pay somewhere around $3-4k for the equivalent of MSDN Universal). Our certs expired sometime in the last year and we had no idea until we tried to renew - and all the new dev courses require knowledge of new technologies like Linq, WPF etc. which are know of or have used a little, but because we're stuck in .Net 2.0 we probably don't know well enough to pass the exams. Our customers have some servers that won't run .Net 3.0+ and actually managing the .Net upgrade across multiple companies and hundreds of PC's is a problem, not to mention that VS2010/.Net 4 dropped support for the compact framework which some of our stuff relies on. That, combined with the fact that we didn't really see anything compelling for our business until .Net 4, means that we are behind the 8 ball now in terms of skillset. It actually isn't hurting us that much in terms of the business, but it's now an issue because of the certs/msdn cost. I haven't really got much experience with the cloud, but we did look at Azure briefly for a project we were doing. I don't *think* anyone elses pricing is better, at least not by a lot, but then again I don't really know. If I were going to the cloud I would still want to use Azure despite the pricing (if it was feasible), from the little I know I think their tools and architecture design for Azure is better than many of the other offerings and being able to leverage stuff I know like .Net is appealing. Sadly, we didn't use Azure (or any other cloud based system) for the project we considered it for *because* of the pricing, so that certainly is an issue. The funny thing about the cloud is that a
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It used to rock being a small software developer using Microsoft tools and technology. They supported us all the way with excellent programs like MSDN Universal which for one flat reasonable price gave you every tool the big guys used. They ditched MSDN Universal and I started to notice all sorts of stuff drifting slowly out of reach. For their online mapping solution they have two plans, free for non commercial useage and eye gougingly expensive to the point you need hundreds of thousands of customers to afford. There seems to be no middle ground any more with them. I'm starting to wonder if they just haven't written off smaller ISV's assuming they use open source software and technology and moved their focus to large corporate developers. The problem with that is small ISV's are no reflection of their client base, we focus on small business and we have thousands of customers all over the globe who use our software as an integral part of their business, in fact it causes them to continually upgrade their windows and buy desktop pc's, year after year, more often than not Office to go along with it etc. If I get pushed into the arms of open source and "cloud" development and move our app entirely online Microsoft loses not merely my MSDN subscription but potentially a lot of desktop computer users and their windows licenses and Office licenses etc etc. And I'm sure as hell not going to Microsoft's Azure cloud with it's unreliable, Byzantine pricing structures and policies. (Though I don't know if anyone else is any better at this point.) Maybe as we are all shoved onto Clouds the small ISV is a thing of the past, maybe you have to have a big investment to roll out a new online app. Maybe you can't start out with a couple of guys in a garage any more.
There is no failure only feedback
Hi I would have to say the opposite. Years ago they were terrible and they are so much better today. I am in Australia and years ago down here MS where terrible. I built a system that replaced a huge amount of unix boxes in a multi national org and was screaming to them for some help and got nothing. In the end MS sold the customer 1000's of windows and office licenses as they were able to replace their major unix system with mine and I did not see any recognition. The big multi national had an account manager to handle the OS and office sales so my software was the catalyst for them moving to windows but got nothing. Any yet to me this is exactly the type of thing that MS should have been aiding an ISV to do. This year I started another company to do web based line of business apps and have found MS so helpful. First they got me a websitespark license and now a bizspark. They have had free training day events and thrown in hosting on Azure. So they key is to start a startup. I have heard people warn that after 3 years when the bizspark license expires that I will be up for big costs. But reality is that if I use Azure to host my SQL Server and Web servers I wont be as this software and the managment is paid monthly and if I am not making money after 3 years well it is time to start another startup anyway.
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No, It is the platform ready test. http://www.microsoftplatformready.com/[^] The website seems to be down for sometime.
Ta for the link - will look at it shortly. :beer: I do wish they'd get their s**t together with testing requirements and present a unified front; conflicting tests and requirements really are part of the problem. :doh:
Anna :rose: Tech Blog | Visual Lint "Why would anyone prefer to wield a weapon that takes both hands at once, when they could use a lighter (and obviously superior) weapon that allows you to wield multiple ones at a time, and thus supports multi-paradigm carnage?"
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Hi, I think you've probably got a lot of mostly helpful feedback from this thread already so there isn't much more to add except my personal pet peeve which is that Bing Maps has no licensing option for ISV's who make Windows based apps for small business. I've been emailing and asking for something for years (well before it became Bing Maps) and though everyone is nice and agrees that it makes little sense that Microsoft doesn't have a license option suitable to get yet more revenue out of their pricey map data they had to pay for, no one manages to accomplish anything. There is no technical reason we can't use Bing Maps with windows software but the license doesn't support it: http://www.microsoft.com/maps/product/licensing.aspx[^] In short I want our customers who use our windows desktop software to be able to work with their data plotted on Bing Maps. Technically more than feasible but the licensing doesn't support it. Get that fixed and I'll truly believe Microsoft cares about ISV's and small business end users.
There is no failure only feedback
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Hi John, I haven't forgotten about you I'm working with the bing maps team to get the answer.
Unless something drastic has changed you're really wasting your time, you'll get endless positive responses that make you *feel* like they care and something might happen but in the end it will be fruitless. I appreciate it anyway.
There is no failure only feedback